The third annual event aims to increase awareness of the variety and vibrancy of college radio worldwide. This year, as part of its yearlong 50th anniversary, WGSU-FM (89.3), SUNY Geneseo’s FCC-licensed radio station and the oldest college station in the Rochester area, is New York state headquarters for College Radio Day.

Like other “old media,” commercial and noncommercial (including most college stations), radio is under duress from digital technologies and changing consumer habits. Newspapers, whose future as recently as a few years ago appeared bleaker than radio’s, seem to be figuring it out. Still experimenting with newer revenue strategies such as metered paywalls, the print-media business model no longer exclusively surrounds the “rolled-up newspaper” dropped on the doorstep; today’s focus is information delivery (in whatever form it reaches consumers).

Such an evolution is not without precedent. Throughout history, old and new media adapted and survived in coexistence (radio didn’t kill newspapers, TV didn’t kill radio). Print, radio, TV — dominant 20th-century mass media — will survive (though not identical in form to 50 to 60 years ago). But unlike newspapers, radio — often featuring unimaginative programming and a weak digital strategy — has been slow to adapt.

“If you care about music, you care about college radio” is this year’s College Radio Day theme. Organizers depict college radio stations as brave “bastions of creative radio programming, free from the constrictions of having to be commercially viable.”

Some of radio’s strengths include immediacy, portability (as the original “wireless”), ease of use (only a single switch — no “booting up” or logging on), low cost (free to consumers, affordable for advertisers), pervasiveness (it’s everywhere), one-to-one audience relationships (better than any other mass medium) and inherently local nature.

Music plays to some of those strengths and is likely to be aired on radio for decades ahead, but I don’t believe it’ll be as pervasive in 10 or 20 years from now. Today’s dominant commercial-radio model of music, DJs, jingles and, yes, commercials (radio’s Achilles’ heel, perhaps) is a roughly 60-year-old formula (radio offered much more in its early days) and possibly not well-suited for the digital age.

But for my 20ish-year-old students, it’s the only radio they know — and many of them choose not to listen. Lack of radio innovation could be partially to blame. So, at WGSU, inside the brave bastion of creativity that is college radio, we’re embracing imaginative thinking about radio’s future. The aims: Better serving both our students and listeners.

We cannot know with certainty radio’s path to ultimate survival. But the mantra “play the hits” (embraced by radio six decades ago when the Golden Age of Television forced an earlier evolution) might no longer cut it as radio searches for relevancy in the 21st century.

As part of its Golden Anniversary, WGSU is proud to join other stations globally and locally, including WGCC-FM (90.7), WHWS-FM (105.7), WITR-FM (89.7) and WRUR-FM (88.5), on “the day college radio comes together.” But in celebrating college radio for “unique and fearless programming,” I encourage greater fearlessness.